coondoggie writes: "Researchers have figured out how to to crack captchas, making it possible to launch automated attacks against sites such as Microsoft, eBay and Digg where opening phony accounts could be turned into cash.

Software written by researchers at Stanford University and Tulane University can interpret human speech well enough to crack audio captchas between 1.5% and 89% of the time — often enough to make sites that use them vulnerable to setting up false user accounts, the researchers say."